Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy: Rethinking Knowledge for the Knowledge Age

Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. (2005). Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy: Rethinking Knowledge for the Knowledge Age. In M. Fullan (Ed.) International Handbook of Educational Change: Fundamental Change. The Netherlands: Springer. pp. 5-22

p.6 -  Key questions:
(1) What does it mean to have a deep knowledge of something?
(2) In what way is a knowledge worker different from any other kind of white-collar worker?

p.11: "The psychology that informed Bloom's taxonomy was a blend of behaviorism, which was the dominant scientific psychology of the day, and a common sense view, which has come to be called 'folk psychology"
From behaviorism came the choice to define educational objectives in behavioral terms and to base the the hierarchy of levels "on the idea that a particular simple behavior may become integrated with other equally simple behaviors to form a more complex behavior" (Bloom, 1956, p. 18)

p.12: Critiques of Bloom’s Taxonomy
1) it defines a hierarchy of general intellectual (domain independent) skills. Problem: students could have signifcant skill in "recognizing unstated assumptions" but fail a test item because they don't have much knowledge of physics
2) the view of knowledge implicit in Bloom’s Taxonomy is not very helpful anymore
3) Bloom’s Taxonomy encourages schools to emphasize the acquisition of low-level factual knowledge because it is the only level that is well defined
4) it is futile to try to define levels of understanding across domains, or even within a domain.
     example: suppose we worked out six levels of understanding of Huckleberry Finn and six levels of understanding of the principle of natural selection. What correspondence could we expect to find between these two hierarchies?
5) it fails to define clearly what "deep understanding" is

p.13 Bereiter and Scardamalia (2005) make the following proposition:
The educated mind has various abilities and dispositions.
Paramount among these are the ability and the disposition to create and work with abstract knowledge objects.

p.14 Definition: "Having a deep understanding of something means understanding deep things about it."

p.17 Provisional scheme of levels for working with knowledge
1. Knowledge as individuated mental states
2. Knowledge as itemizable mental content
3. Knowledge as representation
4. Knowledge as viewable from different perspectives
5. Knowledge as personal artifacts
6. Knowledge as improvable personal artifacts
7. Knowledge as semi-autonomous artifacts